A Village in Picardy

Un Village Tout Oublié

As a relief visitor, in a Unit authorized by the French Government au secours dans la région dévastée, I have lived recently in the Department of the Somme. There I had in my care a village with a personality which I venture to think is typical of Picardy. As such, I would present it to you.

It was on a winter’s morning, by snow and lantern light, that I traversed for the last time a road grown familiar to me through months of use, the road which led from our encampment, known as that of the “Dames Américaines” at Grécourt, past the railroad station of Hombleux to the hamlet of Canizy. It leads elsewhere, of course, this road; to the military highway for instance, which has already seen in the last three years three momentous troop movements: the advance and retreat of the French, the advance and retreat of the Germans, and, again, the victorious sweep of the French and British armies which reclaimed, just a year ago, the valleys of the Somme. It leads to the front, that fluctuating line, some twelve miles distant, in the shelter of which we have lived and worked for the ruined countryside. It is an important route, on some occasions choked with artillery, on others with blue columned infantry swinging down its vista arched with elms. Officers’ cars flash by there, and deafening camions. But for me, until this the morning of my departure, it has led to Canizy.

There is no longer a station at Hombleux, because the Germans destroyed it. One therefore paces the platform and stamps one’s feet with the cold. Down the track, from the direction of Canizy, the headlight of the engine will presently emerge. All about, the plain lies white and level; the break in the hedge where a footpath crosses the tracks to the village is almost visible. In fancy, I take it, past a fire-gutted farm house and eastward on a long curve across fields where the snow hides an untilled growth of weeds. The highway which parallels the railroad, recedes in a perspective of marching trees, till, topping a little rise, a wooden scaffold stands clear against the sky. It was formerly a German observation post. To the left, equally gaunt, rises the Calvary which marks the entrance to the village. And beyond, cupped in a gentle declivity, lie the ruins of Canizy, framed in snow. So I saw it last; so all the way to Amiens, and from Amiens to Paris, as the train bore me away, I saw it; so in its misery and its beauty, I would picture it to you.

You will not find my hamlet on any map of the région dévastée with which I am familiar; it is not listed among the destroyed villages of the Department, although it was looted, dynamited and defaced, even to the cutting of the oak trees about its Calvary. You would have to search minutely in history for any mention of it among the King’s towns of Picardy which became famous in guarding his frontier of the Somme. Comparatively modern and quite insignificant, it lies beside a tree-bordered, dyked canal, one of many which tapped the rich plain and bore the produce of farm and garden to the market centres, of Péronne, Ham and St. Quentin. To this canal sloped its fields of chicory, leeks, pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, carrots and other garden truck. Crooked lanes, brick-walled or faced with trim brick cottages, led from it back through the village to higher ground. There, before the war, the grands cultivateurs, such as M. le Maire, and M. Lanne, who rents the old Château, would have ploughed and sown their winter wheat.

In those days, Canizy had a railroad also, and I have heard how for three sous one could travel by it to Nesle. It took only eight minutes then,—but now! By it as well, one went more quickly than by canal to St. Quentin or Péronne with perhaps a hundred huge baskets of vegetables on market day. But the Germans tore up the bed of the railroad and destroyed the locks of the canal. They blew up, too, the bridge on the main highway which used to pass the Calvary at the foot of the village street. Cut off, reached only by a circuitous and deep-rutted road which is impassable at certain hours every day owing to mitrailleuse practice across it, Canizy lapsed into oblivion. As its mayor said on our first visit, “Look you, it has been quite forgotten,—_c’est un village tout oublié_.”

In 1914, Canizy had 445 inhabitants. Of these, there were perhaps half a dozen substantially well off, such as M. le Maire, possessing ten hectares of wheat land, a herd of seven cows, four horses, thirty rabbits and fifty hens. Besides, M. le Maire, or his wife, was proprietor of one of the three village épiceries. Joined with him in respectful mention by the townspeople are the lessee of the Château, and various owners of property not only in Canizy but in the surrounding country. Of these gentry, not one apparently had been made prisoner by the Germans. They were to be found on their other estates, at Compiègne, at Ham, or in Paris. Even the real mayor was an absentee, so that the acting mayor, lame, red-faced and heady-eyed, was the only representative of landed interests left in the little town. He had had, however, a dozen or more neighbours scarcely less comfortably provided with worldly goods than himself: M. Picard, for instance, who owned extensive market gardens and employed six workers in the fields. He it was who did not suffer even during the German occupation, for was he not placed in charge of the ravitaillement? And though his friends the Germans took him away with them, a prisoner, did not his wife and children live well on his buried money, eh? O, Mme. Picard, elle était riche. There were the Tourets, two brothers, who held connecting high-walled gardens in the centre of the village, and their next door neighbour, the comely widow, Mme. Gabrielle. Directly opposite ranged the Cordier farm, comprising an orchard of 360 trees, ten cows, two bulls, one ox, eighty-seven pigs, three horses, one hundred and fifty chickens, and one hundred and fifty rabbits. Smaller cottages there were, some rented, but most of them owned, where the families raised just enough for their own necessities, or worked for their more prosperous townsfolk. There were the village cobbler, the two store keepers who competed with the mayor, a sprinkling of factory hands who walked along the dyke a mile and a half to work in the brush factory at Offoy, and last on the street, but not least in social importance, the domestics of the Château. There were, too, the poor whom one has always; but in Canizy, so far as I could learn, they consisted of but two shiftless families.

The civic life of the village centred about its public school and its teacher, and, of course, its curé and its church. The monotony of toil was relieved by market days and fête days and first communions and neighbourhood gatherings. Of these last I have seen a few pictures, groups of wrinkled grandparents and sturdy sons and grandchildren stiffly posed in Sunday best, yet happy in spite of it. Behind them pleached pear trees or grape vines make an appliqué against a patterned brick wall. But there are not many of the pictures even left, for you will understand, the Germans systematically searched them out and burned them in great piles. The one that I remember best, a poor mother had torn out of its frame the night of her flight. “I could not think well,” she said. “The Boches had wrenched my Coralie away—so lovely a child that every one on the streets of Ham turned to look at her curls as she walked—but I did save this. See, there she is,—how pretty and good, and that is my eldest, a soldier. He is dead. And that, with the accordion, is my seventeen-year-old Raoul, like his sister, a prisonnier civil. What do the Boches do, think you,” she continued, “with such? One hears nothing, nothing. Never a letter, never a message. Even when Mme. Lefèvre and Mme. Ponchon returned, they brought no word. The prisoners, evidently they are separated. One is told that they work and starve,—that is all.”

A community so homogeneous in its interests, was bound to link itself intimately by marriage as well. The intricacies of the family trees of Canizy were a source of constant mental effort, as one discovered that Mme. Gense was really Mme. Butin, that is, she had at least married M. Butin, and that Germaine Tabary was so called because she was living with her maternal grandparents, whereas her father’s name again was Gense, and her mother was known by the sounding title of Mme. Gense-Tabary. “But why these distinctions?” one continually demanded upon unravelling the puzzles for purposes of record. “Because, otherwise, one would become confused,” was the reply.

Canizy to-day numbers just one hundred souls, fifty being children and fifty adults. It was in March, 1917, that the village was blotted out. Two years and a half of German occupation preceded that event. In every house German soldiers had been billeted; one sees now on the door posts the number of officers and men allotted, or the last warning, perhaps, in regard to concealed fire-arms. For two years and a half the inhabitants had been prisoners, for the same length of time there had been no school and no mass. Yet the villagers do not speak unkindly of their conquerors. They fared better than many, for they fell to the lot of the Bavarians, who are reputed to be more humane than the Prussians. Besides, Picardy is inured to invasions, which for centuries have swept across her plains. By them, fortitude has been inbred.